State Secrets

22 results arranged by date

New York, September 30, 2013-- The Committee to Protect Journalists will release its first comprehensive report on press freedom conditions in the United States. Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor and now the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is the author. The report will be released at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on October 10.

Some of the Internet companies at the heart of the outcry over U.S.
government surveillance today joined with human rights and press freedom
groups, including CPJ, in calling for greater government disclosure of electronic
communications monitoring.

Edward Snowden's global travels have highlighted the chasm
between the political posturing and actual practices of governments when it
comes to free expression. As is well known now, the former government
contractor's leaks exposed
the widespread
phone and digital surveillance being conducted by the U.S. National Security
Agency, practices at odds with the Obama administration's positioning of the United
States as a global leader on Internet
freedom and its calls for technology companies to resist foreign
demands for censorship and surveillance.

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Irrespective of
whether South Africa actually implements the most draconian parts of state
secrets legislation now under consideration, the media in the continent's most
open democracy already feel under threat. The prospect of 25-year jail
sentences for journalists publishing "classified" information has galvanized
disparate news outlets and journalists groups to work together like never
before.

New York, November 22, 2011--The South African National
Assembly today passed an information bill which would sanction unauthorized
possession and publication of classified state information with a prison term
of up to 25 years, according to news reports. The
Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the upper house of parliament to
reject the bill, which has been criticized by Archbishop Desmond
Tutu and former President Nelson Mandela,
among others.

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London's Metropolitan Police this week dropped their attempt to leverage the Official Secrets Act to force The Guardian to reveal confidential
sources for stories about the phone-hacking scandal that has gripped the UK's
political and media world. The Met's reversal is welcome, but its unprecedented
attempt to invoke espionage laws to force a newspaper to reveal confidential sources
has itself set a damaging precedent, suggesting that journalists are state enemies
for obtaining sensitive information from government officials.

On Thursday, during an Independence Day national address, Najib vowed to dismantle two harsh security-related laws--the Internal Security Act and the Emergency Ordinance--and ease legal restrictions on civil liberties, including the right to assembly, international press reports said. He has also vowed to abolish the Printing Presses and Publications Act so that newspapers do not have to reapply annually for permission to publish. The Home Ministry previously had sole discretion over whether to renew newspapers' operating licenses, and its often arbitrary decisions could not be legally appealed.

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There is a deserved celebration in the Nigerian
media over the recently passed Freedom of Information Act, which provides
citizens with broad access to public records and information held by a public
official or institution. It is the
climax of an 11-year struggle to pass such a law in the Nigerian parliament.
Indeed, the call for such a law was first made under military rule, in 1993,
when the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Civil Liberties Organisation, and the
Media Rights Agenda began to clamor for it.

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Dear President Biya: A year ago this week, journalist Germain Cyrille Ngota Ngota died in his cell in Nkondengui prison in the capital Yaoundé while in pre-trial custody on criminal charges based on his activities as the editor of the monthly Cameroon Express. We hold the government responsible for Ngota's death, and we call on you to initiate reforms so that no other Cameroonian journalist is thrown in prison in retaliation for reporting on issues of public interest. We urge you to implement reforms referring press offenses to civil courts, not criminal courts, in line with democracy, transparency and accountability.